Tag Archives: Cuba

We’re in the Havana airport catching our plane to Mexico, but it’s three minutes until the plane leaves and the airport hasn’t posted which gate to go to, or any other information whatsoever. But this seems to be normal. I wander around the airport asking at various (also unmarked) gates where people are headed. At one point, an American pilot advises a crowd of people headed to Atlanta: “I think the gate is actually over there, because that’s where the plane is. That’s where I’m going.”

I find the correct gate, and apparently we’re delayed, just because there’s nobody boarding. We don’t board for another hour, and then, suddenly, the doors open and the attendants begin scanning tickets, no first class, no pre-boarding, no warning at all.

We arrive to Cancun hours later than we expected, and meet up with Ailsa, whose flight from Boston was also delayed. Once we’re in Mexico, we can get our backlog of messages, including the one that Liathan, Collin’s youngest daughter, is also delayed, and will be arriving around midnight. We pick up our rental car and drive towards Cancun to find some dinner. Both Collin and I remark upon how weird it is that all the cars are new, that the roads are new and totally straight, that the strip of box stores and shining lights and gleaming chrome looks as if it’s been transplanted from California. Cancun, I think, is LA for douches; a colony of US amenities washed up on foreign shores to capitalize on the tourists who flock to gaudy resorts with night watchmen.

“I miss Cuba,” Collin says.

We eat dinner and wait for Liathan to land, accompanied by Ailsa’s boyfriend Ben, whom Ailsa has convinced everyone else to allow on the family vacation. As it turns out, it’s a good move, because we discover after dinner that their flight has been postponed yet again. After boarding they were un-boarded, which means now they’re supposed to get in at 4 or 5 am. They’re not sure precisely when because their plane is being fixed. By this time it’s nearly midnight, and we decide to check in to the Cancun airport Marriott in order to be close by; the night watchman at the gate, however, speaks no English, and keeps asking for our reservation. I repeat a couple of words I’ve seen advertised on the casas in Cuba: habitación, disponible: nosotros no tenemos un reservacion pero, uhhh, uhh, un habitación por la noche? Esta disponible? The night watchman nods and writes down our license and we drive through. We then attempt to sleep in between getting tearful phone calls from Liathan and more stoic messages from Ben, who is apparently passing the time by Facebooking minute-by-minute updates to one of Ailsa’s friends from school:

1:15 am — I just got on a second broken plane so that’s how my day is going.

1:20 — I bought pizza and then an hour later they gave it to the rest of the people on my flight for free.

1:23 — Aila’s sister is currently sleeping next to me.

1:28 — I scored blankets from first class.

1:33 — Liathan wakes from her slumber after being roused by a rude elderly woman.

1:36 — I’m now exiting the plane because we can’t get the flight done in a “legal” amount of time so peace out and bye world. If you need me I’ll be in the Minneapolis airport slowly rotting in a corner.

The second time they’re de-boarded, and subsequently told that the flight is cancelled, Ben makes a beeline for the help desk and tells Liathan they are not moving until they get the first flight out. They manage to get the first flight out, and arrive, after staying for a few more hours in the airport, at noon the next day. We drive to Tulum, check into our Air BnB, and take some serious naps.

We’re taking a taxi collectivo to Trinidad. We start out eight passengers crammed into a three-row taxi, me squashed in the back next to a large man at the driver’s request. The driver keeps texting someone as we hurtle down the mostly-empty highway, and I study the sticker he has plastered above his rearview mirror: A Calvin-knockoff comic-book boy flashing the bird and grabbing a tall girl wearing nothing but a thong, with the caption ALANTE NO MONTO VIEJAS. I fake-translate this in my head as “No old women allowed on board,” although I discover later after looking the words up that it would be more accurately “No old women allowed to ride in the front seat.” Either way, it’s charming. I suppose this is why Castro hated pop culture.

We ride two hours and then get shuffled into another “taxi” with eight more people. The driver tries to tell me to get into the back row with four other women because I’m skinny, but I refuse. I’m tired of being squeezed into corners. I take a super-plush hard plastic seat next to the equally small hard plastic seat my boyfriend is sitting in. We quickly discover that the van has no suspension, no vent system, no insulation: $40 per person to rattle down the highway with baggage stuffed underfoot, for the remaining four-plus hours of the trip. Halfway there, we stop for a break and a German girl decides she’s also tired of being squeezed into corners. She takes a French guy’s seat, which offends the French guy. He and his wife begin discussing this highly abnormal and horrific turn of events, in French, while the German girl berates the driver in English: “Everybody needs a seat! There’s not enough seats for everyone! You must arrange something else!” A Portuguese girl translates this into Spanish for the driver, and then translates back his response: “He says it was arranged by the guys in Viñales, and he can’t do anything. He’s just the middle man.”

The German girl hunkers down into her book and her insisted-upon seat. “Assholes,” she mutters in response. Her boyfriend saves the day by making a seat out of a backpack and sitting on it himself.

Six hours into the ride, teeth clattering, Collin announces: “I’m dirty, I’m hot, I’m sweaty, I’m tired, I’m starving, and I have no shoes,” and I laugh, because the fact that he’s devoid of all footwear is really the icing on the cake of this misadventure.

When we arrive at our casa, it’s too late to buy shoes in Trinidad. I tell our host, an endearing old woman who chatters at me in Spanish like I can understand her, of Collin’s predicament. I have researched and memorized a couple of phrases for this occasion. The woman, who thinks Collin’s name is hilarious just to begin with, finds this wildly amusing, and enlists several neighbors to find a pair of flip-flops that he can borrow. Collin is fastidious about most things, but he has apparently come to terms with the realities of being barefoot in Cuba and is genuinely ecstatic to have a pair of too-big, well-worn secondhand sandals. We go to find dinner. We pass one place that I say looks nice, and Collin says it looks too fancy. But I convince him. It is not too fancy, it’s Trinidad, where everything is fancy, in stark opposition to the day’s ordeals. We sit on a rooftop terrace, just the two of us, with the full moon overhead, and eat three courses and drink pina coladas and some local honey-infused cocktail, all for less than $30. “This town is awesome,” we toast, standing up, because the hard plastic seats imprinted on us and there’s no way we can sit down more than is absolutely necessary.

We decide to take the National Forest tour someone told us about, and tell our host. Specifically, I tell our host a bunch of strung-together words and he calls a taxi, which drops us off in a field with a sad and mangy horse surrounded by three men in cowboy hats and rubber mud boots. This is unexpected but not entirely out of character for Cuba, so we roll with it and say we want the walking tour, not the riding tour. One of the men slaps the fattest among them on the stomach and grins. The rotund guide grunts despondently and sets out, the two of us following in our sporty Earth Runner sandals. I ask if he can speak English, since our host assured us the tour would be in English. “A leetle,” he says, and then immediately switches back to Spanish. I decide that this is OK and it just means we get some language lessons in-context.

Our guide says his name is Joel, and begins pointing out plants and views, all in Spanish; mango, sugarcane, sweet potato, guava, avacado. He leads us to a tobacco farm, to a coffee-rum-and-honey farm, and to a cave. This takes three or four hours. I had been under the impression that this tour of the National Park meant we’d be hiking in some kind of jungle, but apparently no. Apparently, instead, I smoke a hand-rolled cigar dipped in honey, chew some sugar cane, and try to learn a bunch of new Spanish words, most of which I immediately forget. Collin’s Earth Runners break in the mud on the way back. “Dang,” he says “that’s my only pair of shoes.” He walks through the mud barefoot the rest of the way, rides in the taxi back barefoot with his broken sandals tucked into his waistband. I tell our guide that it’s fine and that at home, he hikes barefoot all the time.

We try to find him another pair of shoes in Viñales, to no avail. It’s Sunday, which means the shops that exist are closed, and even the open-air tourist markets aren’t selling shoes. So tonight, Collin will have to dine barefoot, and tomorrow, he will have to travel cross-country barefoot. “First world problems,” I say. “but actually, it’s more of a third-world problem, I guess.”

We take a two-hour taxi to Viñales with a couple from New Zealand. We talk about politics nearly the whole time. Not necessarily by choice, but because when you’re an American traveling abroad and your country has just elected a guy that the rest of the world considers to be a dangerous lunatic, specifically the kind of dangerous lunatic that might plunge them into war with China, they want answers. We compare our tax rates and they demand why ours are so high given that we get so much less from what we pay. For what we pay, they get health care and a host of other social services. “But oh, yeah, war,” they remember “war is expensive.”

We get to Viñales and wander the streets, taking photos of farmers with teams of horses and oxen, and later, the view of the valley. It is a good place for photos if you’re into that kind of thing.

We arrive in Havana slowly, lines moving through the exit metal detectors at a humid pace, lines at the currency exchange languid as well. We go to find a taxi to take us to the casa particulare Collin has managed to book in advance using Paypal and Air BnB. I brandish the address I’ve written on a scrap of paper. The lady at the information desk does not speak English, but she does know a guy who can take us to our destination — specifically that guy right there. That guy right there is muy simpatico, and we roll out of the airport in his vintage Russian car with an agreed-upon price between us, past a billboard with photos of Castro through the ages, blazoned with the slogan Fidel Entre Nosotros. I wonder if this has been put up in the two weeks since his death, or if it’s older than that.

The streets are full of vintage cars and diesel fumes, windows rolled down for breeze, me leaning forward to try to communicate with the driver. My pretend-Spanish is only about as good as the French and English cognates he says, which means that I say “si” every few seconds to the things he helpfully points out, like the Plaza de la Revolución, the statue of Che, a photo of his daughter on his phone, the fact that Donald Trump is horrible. I pretend-translate between the driver and Collin when Collin realizes he can’t see any street signs. “No existo de nombres de … via?” and I point out the window. “Si, si,” the driver agrees, “Es Cuba!” and he waves the need for them away. He yells out the window to a random guy: “oy, chico!” and gets directions. We continue down an alleyway teeming with people, bicycles, construction, trim and beautiful girls in pristine school uniforms.

I’ve never seen Collin look so much like a child: eyes as round as saucers, somewhere between terror and delight. We come to a pile of construction rubble in the narrow alley and the driver stops, turns, speaks to me. “What’d he say?” Collin asks, and I say, authoritatively, although I’m not remotely convinced it’s true: “He said he’d leave the car and walk with us to the address.” As it turns out, I guessed accurately. The driver locks up his taxi, shoulders my bag, and marches us through la Plaza Vieja a few blocks to our destination. He rings the bell for us. No answer, or at least none that we can hear, because a quad of youth on the balcony of a nearby crumbling building are blasting Iggy Azalea and reggaeton so loud that nobody can hear anything. The driver yells upwards to the casa’s cleaning lady until she buzzes us in; he doesn’t leave until he’s sure we’re going inside. We tip him well.

The nephew of our host greets us wearing a Bluetooth earpiece and a bike-shorts-and-spandex-top ensemble that’s just loose enough to indicate that it’s a fashion statement. He speaks no English. We wait for our host, sipping water and listening to the deafening syncopation of Iggy Azalea.

Collin, still a bit dazed, says he is nervous about getting around Cuba given that neither of us speaks Spanish. “Nah,” I say “we got here fine. I do this all the time. It’s easier in Spanish than in Thai or Japanese. Way easier. Aren’t you impressed with my fake Spanish?”

Our host arrives, and he speaks English. He tells us where we can find dinner, and says not to worry, the streets may be loud, and dark at night, but they are safe, safer than anywhere else in South America. He yells out the window for the youth to turn the music down.

We explore Havana for the next day and a half, mostly just walking and taking pictures. We quickly get the lay of Old Havana, where there are street signs after all. We drink agua con gas, listening to tour guides tell us about buried Spanish treasure and pirates. Havana is beautiful, and frenetic, and also laid-back; ruined and restored; underrated and yet full of tourists and people wanting us to tip them, from the unwanted table magician to the postal worker.

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About

Katie Botkin is based in the Northern Rockies, where she finds ample opportunity to explore and find quietus. She sees her family often. When she is not otherwise occupied, she blogs.